Raytheon's Riot Program Mines Social Network Data For Intelligence Agencies

Shipud writes "Raytheon has secretly developed software capable of tracking people's movements and predicting future behavior by mining data from social networking websites according to The Guardian. An 'extreme-scale analytics' system created by Raytheon, the world's fifth largest defense contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. Raytheon says it has not sold the software — named Riot, or Rapid Information Overlay Technology — to any clients. But the company has acknowledged the technology was shared with U.S. government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analyzing 'trillions of entities' from cyberspace. The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns."

Comments

easy solution

[msheekhah]

Just don't post location data or activities if you're engaging in protests... disable location services on your phone. You're giving data to a public database and then crying about privacy... just don't give them information.

Re:easy solution

[Thanshin]

Just don't post location data or activities if you're engaging in protests... disable location services on your phone. You're giving data to a public database and then crying about privacy... just don't give them information.

How can you be sure that everyone who's participating in that same protest followed your advice?

They don't need the information you post if they already have the information other people post about you.

Re:easy solution

[betterunixthanunix]

It's not the protest itself that is secret, but the planning. The point of spying on activists before they stage a protest is to crack down on the protest, to spread propaganda just before the protest, to move important meetings away from the protest site, etc.

Re:sample data

[TWX]

You're assuming that they need access to private data on Facebook to make this work. Between the lack of people fine-tuning their privacy settings, and the ability of other users to note what one is doing even if one doesn't share such information, and it's no surprise that they can develop this software.

R.I.O.T. sourcecode

[sl4shd0rk]

#!/bin/bash

while [ 1 ]; do
   wget -q https://twitter.com/YourAnonNews -O /tmp/aa1.txt
   wget -q https://plus.google.com/117604887745850959716 -O /tmp/aa2.txt
   wget -q http://anonnews.org/ -O /tmp/aa3.txt

   egrep '(meetup|protest|flashmob|operation|torrent|TPB)' /tmp/aa*txt | mail -s '+0p 53cr3tz' opswatch@raytheon.com
   sleep 300
done

Programmer ethics?

[Okian Warrior]

I've often wondered about the programmers who write these software packages.

The stereotype programmer is young, bright, scientific, idealistic, and concerned for global issues.

And yet, big companies have no problem staffing teams to write the software for predator drones, Carnivore, Total Information Awareness, and other packages which are used to violate human rights.

Where do these "programmers of dubious character" come from?

Many programmers say (when I ask) that they have high moral standards - more so than (they say) the average person. And yet, they work on all sorts of sketchy things.

Can anyone explain the disconnect? Is there a level of "bravery" associated with morality (ie - I'm against *this*, but not willing to lose my job over it)? Are moral arguments here (for example) just blowing smoke?

Re:Programmer ethics?

[the eric conspiracy]

Well, you have two data points. The existence of all sorts of software designed to take advantage of information easily available on the internet, and a 'feeling' that programmers possess some special moral character. The answer to this conflict is obvious.

The idea that programmers have some special moral character is nonsense.

Re:YARNTDFB

[AliasMarlowe]

Yet Another Reason Not To Do FaceBook.

And Twitter, Foursquare, and the rest of the so-called "social" web. Anyway, if they're interested in finding terrorists and whatnot, they should probably look elsewhere. If they're interested in picking up stuff to use against their own citizens (Stasi-style), then they're probably on the right track.

Re:psychohistory

[schneidafunk]

The first reference to it was in 1942 by Asimov.